Dust 514 goes open beta January 22

CCP Games' ambitious crossover shooter Dust 514 will enter open beta on January 22 today, the EVE Online developer announced today. As a free-to-play download-only title on PlayStation 3, that means the game is more or less released to everyone aside from the CCP employees slaving away on inevitable piles of bug reports.

The multiplayer shooter, which puts mercenary boots on the ground of EVE's inhabitable planets, uplinked with the space sim's servers for the first time on January 10, allowing players in either title to interact with and influence each other's corporations and conflicts.

While Dust 514 is a PS3 exclusive right now, PC Gamer reports CCP has previously affirmed it intends for the game to long outlast the current generation of consoles--meaning a PC release is all but assured at some point.

“Our plan is that we want in another ten years to be having ‘EVE is 20′ and ‘Dust is 10′ [events],” said EVE Online executive producer Jonathan Lander. “The whole way that we’re doing our development process is so that we can push out expansions on a regular basis. We’re not going to ship a unit and then in six months it’s off the shelves and people have stopped playing it.”